by Ann Rule
“Our Job’s Daughters’ group sold T-shirts that summer that said, ‘Where were you when the ship hit the span?’ and they were a big hit. It couldn’t have been easy for Neslund to be the butt of such jokes, but surely he also knew it wasn’t all a bad outcome?”
Rolf was allowed to retire without censure, but there were many who thought how much better it might have been if he had chosen to bow out a year or so earlier. And the Coast Guard enacted age regulations for future pilots. It was the end of an era.
Rolf’s fellow pilots continued to revere him and welcome him to their meetings, parties, and celebrations. He had had so many, many years of being among the best men on the sea. Nevertheless, Rolf Neslund became a target for jokes—not just on Lopez Island for his domestic fisticuffs—but for being the man who destroyed the West Seattle Bridge.
Everyone who read the newspapers or watched television recognized his name.
Rolf returned to Lopez Island, to his wife and his home on Alec Bay Road. Lesser men might have been humiliated and hidden away, but he wasn’t a broken man, not at all. Some people even said that he looked back on the whole incident with a sense of humor, while others said he was simply whistling in the dark.
The former was closest to the truth. He had survived much devastation in his long life, and Rolf continued to appreciate the twilight of his years. He preferred to listen to those who said he had done West Seattleites a favor. He had only hurried the project along.
Now retired, Rolf returned to Norway for another visit in 1979, joining his siblings in Oslo for the skating championships.
“He was happy and gay,” his sister Eugenie recalled. “The last time I saw him was in Oslo and he was just like himself. We had lots of fun.”
This was probably the twelfth trip Rolf Neslund made to see his family in Norway, and neither Eugenie nor his brother Harald found him depressed about the debacle surrounding the West Seattle Bridge collapse. He was like he had always been, except perhaps a little more content to stay at home. If he ever needed to talk about what had happened, Harald felt he would know and they would talk about it then.
As things turned out, no one would have much of a chance to ask Rolf exactly how he did feel about the bridge.
No one would have much of a chance to ask Rolf anything.
Four
In the seventies, Ray Clever was a cop in Newport Beach, California, a smart young policeman who hoped one day to emulate the older, experienced detectives he watched with something like awe. “They could get suspects to tell them almost anything,” he says with a smile. “I used to sit in the interrogation rooms just to watch them work, hoping I could learn from them.”
One of Clever’s heroes was a detective named Sam “the Shark” Amburgy, whose mastery of interrogation was phenomenal—low key and silent and deadly as his nick-name—and who always wore a fedora. A younger officer with a friendly open face, Clever carried out the usual routine duties of patrol, but his ambition was to be a criminal investigator himself one day. He remembered the way the experienced detectives questioned suspects, noting that they often let them ramble on long enough to back themselves into a corner without ever realizing it. What might seem to be only a casual conversation could be, in reality, a delicate game of cat and mouse.
Some of the older detectives were very intense and some seemed laid-back, but Clever found them remarkable in their ability to elicit information that their subjects never expected to reveal.
Clever rose through the ranks in the Orange County department and become a detective there, but his first marriage ended in what he recalls as “a bad divorce,” when he was in his midthirties. He didn’t have much to distract him from the disappointment of his failed marriage; he was back working patrol rather than investigating baffling murder cases. He wanted to change his life completely and move someplace as unlike Orange County, California, as possible. Clever’s brother, Dick, was a reporter for the Post-Intelligencer, the morning newspaper in Seattle, Washington, and he made Seattle sound like a good place to live. Ray moved north.
He became a building contractor first. He was always talented in construction and tile and granite work. It wasn’t his real ambition—that was law enforcement— but Clever also enjoyed building.
“But then there was a downturn in the economy,” he recalls, “and pretty soon I needed a job.”
San Juan County was hiring deputies, and Ray Clever had experience. He was hired on in February 1981. He didn’t expect a lot of action on any of the four little islands that composed San Juan County. It wasn’t the ideal place to commit robberies or burglaries since the felons would have to wait for the next ferry to make their escapes. DWIs (Driving While Intoxicated) and family fights were more likely than homicides, although anywhere human beings live there are sex offenders, disputes between neighbors, and even love triangles. Still, there was little chance that all Clever’s studying and observation of master detectives in Orange County was going to pay off in San Juan County, Washington. Nevertheless, Clever liked the region and he was glad to have the job.
He was assigned to Patrol on Lopez Island and told the name of his first partner: Senior Deputy Greg Doss. Clever didn’t know the geography of Lopez Island, or anything about its residents. For that matter, he had never even seen Doss before they met on Clever’s first day on the job on February 23.
The two deputies had been asked to check on the welfare of a longtime Lopez resident named Rolf Neslund. Apparently, he hadn’t been seen in his usual haunts for some time, and members of the Puget Sound Pilots’ Association had become concerned. Gunnar Olsborg, a retired pilot and a Norwegian like Rolf, who had been his friend since 1945, talked to a number of pilots who were used to seeing Rolf often. He found that no one had seen Rolf for months. Gunnar was worried enough to call the sheriff’s office. He had also notified Rolf’s relatives in Norway. He made sure the Puget Sound pilots all knew that Rolf seemed to be missing.
Ray Clever, of course, had never heard of the allegedly missing man, but then he didn’t know anyone on Lopez. This call sounded routine, a familiar task for any police officer anywhere. Adults usually disappeared for their own reasons and most of them came home within a week...or eventually.
“Our first dispatch, my first call ever on the San Juan Sheriff’s Department,” Ray Clever remembers, “was to the Rolf and Ruth Neslund residence on Alec Bay Road.”
As they headed toward the Neslunds’, Doss gave Clever some background on the couple. They had become very familiar to local deputies. “We’ve been called out there on a lot of domestic disturbances,” Doss said. “It’s probably something like that again.”
Doss told his new partner that he’d been on a call to the Neslunds on June 15, seven months earlier. At that time, he’d seen obvious signs of a physical fight. “Their place was a mess,” he recalled. “There were dishes and the tablecloth on the floor. Rolf had fresh scratches along the side of his face from his ear to his chin.”
Ruth, he said, had been hiding in the bedroom, her clothing and hair a mess, her face puffy. She told Doss she was safe there, but if Rolf came in, she was going to shoot him.
In July, Ruth called the sheriff again, complaining that Rolf had “decked” her. She pointed to a rifle and said that he would never do it again.
It had seemed an idle threat at the time.
Ray Clever wondered how a couple whom Doss described as sixty and eighty years old could do much real damage to each other. He fully expected his first assignment as a San Juan County deputy to be quite ordinary. “Domestics” were the most dangerous calls for law enforcement officers, but the Neslunds sounded pretty long in the tooth to be a danger.
He had no idea how wrong he was. Nor did anyone else.
Five
It was midafternoon on that blustery February day, but Ray Clever noted the magnificent view as they approached the Neslund home, passing the McKay Harbor Inn, where off-islanders were glad to pay the upscale prices for gourmet meals, and the
n turning down the lane to the sprawling red house set close to the water. Ruth Neslund welcomed the deputies and invited them in. She was a matronly looking woman with short, dyed hair set in a tightly curled permanent, her eyes magnified behind her glasses. She had carefully applied bright red lipstick. She didn’t appear nervous and she was pleasant enough. Her home was warm, clean, and decorated comfortably.
The two deputies explained why they had come—just to check on how her husband was doing. Ruth assured them that Rolf certainly wasn’t missing. “He’s gone,” she said cryptically, “but he’s not missing.”
She told them calmly that she knew perfectly well where her husband was, and there was no reason for anyone to be concerned.
Sighing, she spoke to the deputies in a confidential tone. She admitted that her marriage was going through a rough patch. By mutual agreement, she and Rolf were technically separated—but only while they worked things out. Clever studied her face as she talked. She anticipated their questions, quickly filling any silences that might be awkward with what seemed to him far too many words. She was quite animated, but something rankled them. Her explanations about her husband’s whereabouts were much too detailed. Clever thought that Ruth Neslund was telling them far more than she needed to, as if she was trying too hard to be convincing. He wondered if she might even have planned what she was going to say if anyone asked.
Clever had a lawman’s “hinky” feeling about the situation, wondering if it was possible that his very first call on his new job might not involve far more than a marital spat. To be on the safe side, Doss and Clever agreed that Ruth Neslund should be advised of her rights under the Miranda Law.
Clever read each clause, and she shook her head willingly, almost impatiently. She knew she didn’t have to talk with them, that she could have an attorney present if she wanted, and if she couldn’t afford one, the county would pay to have one appointed.
“Are you willing to talk with us?” Clever asked.
“Of course,” she said.
Ruth explained that Rolf had left their home on Monday, August 11, 1980—a little more than six months earlier. After consulting a calendar, she changed her statement a little.
“You know, it might have been the Thursday after that—the fourteenth,” she mused. “I really can’t remember which. I recall that he took his clothes, and he wanted some of the furniture. But he never came back to get it.”
Ruth said that she had come across Rolf’s favorite vehicle—his Lincoln Continental—in the employees parking lot of the ferry dock over on the Anacortes side of the ferry run. But that had occurred by chance some two or three weeks after Rolf walked out on her. She had then arranged to bring the car back to their residence.
Considering that they had been married for almost twenty years, it seemed odd that Ruth was so sanguine about her longtime husband’s disappearance, but she continued to discuss the precise details of his leavetaking in a dispassionate way. It was as if he had only stepped out to go to the store for milk and bread, never to return.
Maybe she had grown tired of their relationship; perhaps she had come to accept that he wasn’t coming back to her in the six months since he’d left her. Different people face life-changing events in their own way. Clever didn’t know Ruth at all; she might just be a stoic woman, long since grown used to disappointment in her life.
Ruth told them that she was pretty sure she knew why Rolf had left her. She had always suspected that he was sneaking around with a woman named Elinor Ekenes, his old girlfriend from way back in 1961. She’d been suspicious of their relationship for as long as she could remember. In fact, she believed that Rolf was currently with Elinor—the two of them flying away together.
“Rolf’s gone off to Norway with Elinor,” she said firmly. “I did my best. I followed him all the way to Norway. I took Flight 726 on Scandinavian Airways.”
“When was that?” Clever asked.
“I think it was on October 10,” Ruth said. “I spent two days in Norway looking for him. But I didn’t find them.”
No, she said she hadn’t contacted any of his family members in his native country because she didn’t think they’d know where he was.
Clever jotted the information about her flight to Norway in his notebook. “Fine,” he said, smiling. “We can check on that and you’ll be on the list of passengers.”
As he glanced up, he saw that the lines in Ruth Neslund’s face had suddenly rearranged themselves into a mask of shock. “She was really startled,” he recalled. “Her face just dropped and her mouth hung open. She hadn’t expected anyone to follow up on what she told us. She figured we’d just go away and be satisfied with her version of where her husband was.”
A man in his fifties—or even sixties—might be expected to leave his wife and a comfortable home in a midlife crisis and take off with another woman. But eighty? It didn’t ring true to either Greg Doss or Ray Clever, and Ruth Neslund noticed their doubt.
Her answers became much more guarded as they questioned her about her flight to catch Rolf with her rival. She wasn’t giving nearly as many details, and her hands fluttered nervously in her lap as they continued to ask more specific questions about why Rolf had left—and when.
Doss and Clever spent about half an hour in the Neslunds’ home, with the interview growing more stilted as the minutes passed. Ruth had gradually turned toward Greg Doss, whose questions weren’t as accusing, dismissing Ray Clever. It was apparent that she didn’t care for Clever or his constant note-taking.
When they left, she was far less animated than she had been. As they drove away, Clever remarked to Doss, “I don’t know whether she killed him or not, but she did something to him, and she’s lying to us.”
They were back at the Neslund house the next day. Ray Clever read Ruth her Miranda rights again, and asked if she would be willing to continue their conversation. Ruth seemed somewhat more relaxed than she had been when they left. Again, she said, “Of course.”
The investigators proceeded, deliberately giving the impression that they believed that Rolf Neslund might have left of his own accord, but could subsequently have had an accident or even died of a stroke or heart attack. Clever asked Ruth if she had a current photograph of her husband, and she gestured toward several color photos on an end table. They were mostly family pictures, showing Ruth and Rolf together at different stages in their marriage, or with other family members.
It looked as though Ruth might have been feeling sentimental about her marriage because there was a projector set up with a screen in the living room. Several slides of happier days lay near the projector.
She picked out two pictures of Rolf and handed them to Ray Clever. “This looks like him now,” she said.
Ruth began another long and rambling monologue on her suspicions of where he might be. It was difficult to break into her opinions, but Clever interrupted her. “Can you give me any information about your husband that would help us identify him—even if he should not be alive now?”
She stared at him, as if it had never occurred to her that Rolf might be dead. “Well, he has some tattoos—old tattoos,” she said. “On his right forearm, he has a heart with an arrow through it—and it says ‘Muriel’ above it. That was some girlfriend he had a long time ago. She’s dead now.
“And on his left forearm, he’s got something that looks like a Coast Guard insignia, or maybe it’s an American flag. And on the middle finger of his right hand, there’s an arrow tattooed around that finger.”
Ruth remembered myriad details about her missing husband. When Clever asked her if there were dental X-rays available for Rolf, she shook her head. “His teeth are false—both uppers and lowers. Dr. Sam Anderson made them. His office is on Northwest Eighty-fifth in Seattle. And he had prescription glasses from Dr. Heffernan at the PayLess Drugstore at Thirty-fifth and Aurora.”
According to Ruth, it was also quite possible that Rolf had once had two broken fingers. “I think Elinor broke them once in her
lawyer’s office in Canada. He never got them treated, as far as I know.”
Now Ruth began to talk about Elinor again, going into detail about all the legal problems she had endured because of Elinor and her attorneys. Whether she was questioned about her alleged love rival or not, Ruth was determined to bring Elinor into the conversation.
“Have you had any letters or calls from Elinor or her attorneys recently?” Ray Clever asked her.
“No,” she said firmly. “Of course not. That’s ridiculous, because I have nothing to do with her.” Ruth re-emphasized her lack of communication with Rolf’s one-time fiancée.
“Anything else about Rolf that makes him stand out?” Clever asked.
Ruth half-smiled as she told Clever that Rolf was bow-legged. “Too many years of riding decks on the ocean.” He also had a split diaphragm, an injury that he sustained when he was a young man and lifted a heavy log.
Ruth Neslund was clearly a woman with a keen memory, and a talent for minutiae. Whatever their differences, she had known her husband well.
She listed his clothing sizes: “Jacket, 41 chest; shirt, 15½ neck, 33 sleeve; pants, 35 waist, 29 inseam. He wore size 9½ shoe, and a 6⅞ hat.”
She suggested that the investigators check Elinor Ekenes’s house to see if Rolf had his clothes stored there. She recalled that Rolf had a particular set of cuff links that he always wore with his French cuff shirts. “They were Viking ships. He had other cuff links, too, but I never saw him without the Viking ship ones.”
Clever asked if they might look at Rolf’s jewelry box— still at the Neslunds’ home—to see if he had left anything behind. But Ruth kept talking as if she hadn’t heard him. After he’d asked her several more times, she finally agreed to lead the deputies to the box. When Clever glanced in, he saw at once that the Viking ship cuff links that she had just described were among her husband’s left-behind jewelry. There was also a very expensive man’s watch with a broken metal wristband.